The first, to paraphrase, is "Health reasons. Yeah, right." Neither you, nor I, nor his employers believe he's resigning for his health, not unless being the chosen scapegoat for the politicised public service has become life-threatening as well as career-threatening.

Prebble's resignation seems an appropriate time to examine something else: why bureaucrats get paid so damn much to do so little. Apparently they're paid up to twenty percent on average more than people doing real jobs. Writes John Gibson in the National Business Review, (reporting on research into why public servants in New Zealand get paid 20 per cent more than similar workers in the private sector):

My research shows that this pay gap is not due to obvious differences in job conditions, such as stress, whether jobs require physical labour, how interesting the work is or the scope for improving ones skills. But the source of this pay gap has become apparent in recent months. It's the "bite your lip and be the fall guy" premium.

As Paul Walker suggests, twenty percent obviously wasn't enough to keep Prebble. Like everyone else, I now look forward now to reading what stories he can tell in his memoirs.

Flame warriors

We've all met them. There's no more complete set of flame warriors in the local blogosphere than those who can often be found sparring in the thickets of Kiwiblog's comments, but the same games are played on nearly every forum on the internet.

Cartoonist Mike Reed has spotted, listed and drawn up all the usual suspects one finds in the usual internet-based rows -- a complete "roster of the online belligerents" he calls Flame Warriors, ranging from the Artful Dodger and the Netiquette Nazi, to Furious Typist and Lonely Guy. (Pictured right is Profundus Maximus, who "eagerly holds forth on all subjects, but his thin knowledge will not support a sustained assault and therefore his attacks quickly peter out.")

You see them all in every internet discussion, and you can see them in full colour at his site: Flame Warriors. [Hat tip Richard Goode.]

Student loans won't cost very much. Yeah, right.

When the student loan election bribe was uncorked last election, it was predicted by everyone from bankers to political opponents to Cactus Kate that it was going to cost a lot -- up to $1billion said Westpac's Brendan O'Donovan, three times what Labour's electioneers were saying -- and "would ... cause an explosion in student debt."

No, no, no said finger-wagging Labour spin doctors and Green cheerleaders at the time, carefully keeping their their eyes on the polls, their fingers crossed and their calculations to themselves. "Extremist and scaremongering" said a cynically vote-mongering Mallard about O'Donovan's now proven predictions.

Three years later, guess who was right? "Research released today by TNS Conversa revealed average student debt had risen by 54 per cent since 2004" -- and let's face it, there can't be one person with a working brain who's truly surprised -- and NZUSA president Paul Falloon (who apparently wasn't awake three years ago) blames banks for "seizing the chance to entice students as customers."

Apparently Mr Falloon is in need of that working brain. It isn't banks who are "seizing the chance" to entice students as customers -- it was the Clark Government's election bribe which sought to entice short-sighted students as voters (and don't forget that Labour-Lite now endorse the bribe).

Labour liars weren't wrong when they said their no-interest loan bribe wouldn't cause an explosion in student debt: they just didn't care two hoots that it would. What interested them far more, and interests them still, is getting their bums back on the Treasury benches -- and short-sighted students were ideally placed to lap up their bribe and repay it later in the country's polling booths.

The attention span of student presidents may be shorter than the average spin cycle; there's no need for anyone else's to be.

'Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer' - Rembrandt

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Counterfeit capital

Here's a curly one for you: What's the difference between capital expansion and credit expansion? It's important. The answer could well affect your future for some years to come.
Give up? Here's George Reisman with the answer, in his latest column:

Capital in the form of credit is normally and, certainly, properly, extended out of previously accumulated savings. In sharpest contrast, credit expansion is the creation of new and additional money out of thin air, which money is then lent to business firms and individuals as though it were a supply of new and additional saved up capital funds. Its existence serves to reduce interest rates and to enable loans to be made and debts to be incurred which otherwise would not have been made or incurred. Always and everywhere, to the extent that private banks participate in the process of credit expansion, they do so with the sanction and generally with the active encouragement of the government.

See the difference? One's real, and one's illusory. New capital is the product of genuine productive activity, and is limited by the extent to which the fruits of production can be saved and reinvested; credit expansion on the other hand is a political tool that gains whatever value it has by diluting existing money. As Don Boudreaux points out:

Government cannot create genuine spending power; the most it can do is to transfer it from Smith to Jones. If the Treasury sends a stimulus check to Jones, the money comes from taxes, from borrowing, or is newly created.

Stimulus like this is a way governments' bankers fake prosperity. It's a way of 'putting a penny in the fusebox,' allowing economic activity to artificially expand and to keep expanding, yet just as putting a penny in your fusebox now only makes the eventual explosion of your whole circuit board more likely, so too does the cheap 'socialised financing' of fake credit risk a more serious meltdown of the world's economies.
You see, just as reality can't be faked indefinitely, neither can that phoney credit expansion continue indefinitely. As Warren Buffett is supposed to have said, "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked." Those loans that were made and debts that were incurred which otherwise would not have been made or incurred are what intelligent economists recognise as malinvestment (a misallocation of resources often following a period of artificially excessive credit). They are chickens searching for somewhere to come home and roost once colder economic winds start blowing. The headlines you've been reading in recent days and weeks is the sound of their feathers flying overhead as their financial perches collapse.
Now with that in mind, can you deduce the result of the 'economic stimulus' packages touted by statists of different persuasions to offer a 'soft landing' for all those desperately roosting chickens. The common factor with all these packages is yet further expansion of created credit, consuming even more real capital. Like drug pushers doling out another fix, the world's central bankers dole out more and more and more printed money in a bid to stave off the inevitable. If you or I were to print money it would be called "counterfeit", but when the banks print money it's called "stabilizing the economy."
The problem is it doesn't. That counterfeit capital consumes real capital. Only governments' central banks can create credit out of thin air, and as Reisman points out, it's the expansion of easy credit that creates the boom-bust cycles that conventional wisdom blames on free markets, and sets everyone up for the 'easy fix' of more easy credit once the 'easy credit boom' starts turning to a real and genuine bust -- and, once the bust finally and definitely hits, it consumes the real and genuine capital produced over preceding years and by the sweat of previous generations like a firestorm going through a forest.
It's no accident that of the two leading periods of credit expansion in history, the first, in the 1920s, led to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when it took more than a decade to build up sufficient real capital to dig the way out of the hole the central bankers had gotten the world into.
And the second leading period of credit expansion? That was the 1990s. Sit tight now as the central bankers keep tinkering through the 2000s.
* * * * * NB: George Reisman offers a course of study based on his book Capitalism that every intelligent adult needs to understand the many fallacies of conventional economics which a colleague of mine intends to offer here in Auckland, starting in late February/early March. It is a comprehensive, in-depth defence of the capitalist economic system, that he proposes to run once a week over the course of the coming year. Think of it as essential economic self-defence. Details of the course contents can be found at Professor Reisman's site. For more information and the proposed schedule of the Auckland study group, please ring Julian on (09) 623 8111. Be aware that places are strictly limited.
If you have or plan to have any kind of intellectual career, not only as a professional economist, but as a writer or journalist, as a teacher of philosophy, history, literature, psychology, mathematics, or any of the natural sciences, at whatever level; if you are interested in politics, whether as a potential candidate for office or simply as a voter who wants a serious understanding of the issues; if you are a businessman who wants to know how to defend himself and his company from scurrilous attacks; if you are anyone who wants to know what he is talking about when it comes to matters of politics and economics, this program is a necessity for you.

'Friend' - Hone Tuwhare

Friend, Do you remember that wild stretch of land with the lone tree guarding the point from the sharp-tongued sea?

The boat we built out of branches wrenched from the tree, is dead wood now. The air that was thick with the whir of toetoe spears succumbs at last to the grey gull’s wheel.

Oyster-studded roots of the mangrove yieldno finer feast of silver-bellied eels, and sea-snails steaming in a rusty can.

Friend, allow me to mend the broken ends of shared days: but I wanted to say that the tree we climbed that gave food and drink to youthful dreams, is no more. Pursed to the lips her fine-edged leaves made whistle—now stamp no silken tracery on the cracked clay floor.

Friend, in this grim time of dark unrest I press your hand if only for reassurance that all our jewelled fantasies were real and wore splendid garb. Perhaps the tree will strike fresh roots again: give soothing shade to a hurt and troubled world.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Spin is still in

Spin is already as endemic thisyear as it has beeninyear'spast. Despite campaigning for everybody else’s political affiliations and home addresses to be outed for one year in three and passing legislation under urgency to take "anonymous money" out of politics, the Labour Party has at the same time been funding, hosting and all but paying the staff's salaries for the blog that calls itself 'The Standard.' Story here. According to the law the pseudonymous co-bloggers themselves promoted at that blog, The Sub-Standard (as it will be known when the histories are written) should be wearing a parliamentary crest to show we've paid for it, a list of the names and home addresses of the contributors, and the following disclaimer (courtesy of the blogger known as 'Insolent Prick'):

“The Standard is proudly supported by the Labour Party, which subsidises the hosting of this blog. Some Standard authors are active Labour Party members. Some Standard authors are also paid employees of the EPMU. Some Standard authors are employed by Parliamentary Services and work in the Beehive.”

Or was the Electoral Finance Act only supposed to muzzle the Clark Government's opponents, rather than its few remaining supporters?

Ronald Reagan's war

If you've never heard of the 'Reagan Doctrine' and have no idea how its application helped to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, then a new film 'Charlie Wilson's War' starring Tom Hanks might just encourage you to read your history a bit closer.

The chief architect of the Reagan Doctrine was Dr. Jack Wheeler -- adventurer, freedom fighter and Aristotelian scholar -- who notes in this fascinating interview [pdf] that the Doctrine "was launched in the early 1980s, at a time it seemed almost inconceivable that the Soviet Union would ever collapse, much less quickly, within 8 short years. But our analysis showed that the structure of the Soviet Empire, including the Soviet Union itself, was brittle... which is why the result of the stress placed upon it by the Reagan Doctrine was that the Soviet Union shattered virtually overnight."

Charlie Wilson was Wheeler's friend, a principled anti-communist and the guy who ran the crucial Afghanistan section of the operation. Of the film Wheeler says "it is both true and not true, magnificent and ludicrous at the same time," and concludes,

caveats aside, I am so glad this movie was made. It is so much better than the book, which is hopelessly permeated with hyper-liberal prejudice. It is wonderful that the world knows about this extraordinary man, knows what a hero Charlie Wilson is. The movie overplays his flamboyance as much as the décolletage of his staff... The moral lesson of the movie should be a very sobering one for the Democrat Party. Charlie Wilson was proudly and unashamedly a Pro-American, Anti-Communist Democrat. His heroism should be a deep embarrassment to the party of Pelosi Galore and Lost Harry Reid, the party who apologizes for America's existence and has neither the spine nor will to defend her. The Democrat Party - indeed, America - needs more Charlie Wilsons. I will always have the greatest respect for what he did for our country, and I will always treasure his friendship.

Politics is broken...

...and apparently the cure could be more totty. Fleshbot figures that if recruiting candidates like Alina Kabayeva (right) whose chief qualifications for candidacy are that they are sexy and female worked for Vladimir Putin, then surely it can work for "Libertarian or Green parties" they say. "If Libertarian or Green parties had thought of this tactic," they say, "we wouldn't be in the state we're in now."

Suitable libertarian candidates for this year's elections might like to contact me for an interview.

More steroids please

Not content with all the earlier financial bailouts and rescue packages from the world's politicians for the world's troubled financial centres (and all those now being offered), the 2008 stock market slide has seen the US Federal Reserve push the panic button overnight, serving up rocket fuel to add to the earlier diet of rocket fuel on which it had placed the US economy. Steve Horwitz points out what should be obvious to any intelligent financial commentator:

...excessive supplies of credit enabled mortgage lenders to give out high loan-to-value mortgages right and left, leading to delinquencies and foreclosures, supposedly leading to a weakening economy and a falling stock market, which the Fed is now attempting to "cure" by cutting rates by 75 basis points, which will inject even more funds into the economy. Am I missing something here? The "hair of the dog" is not a good hangover cure.

And (to add to the metaphors) prescribing more steroids as a cure for excessive earlier doses is a sure sign of a quack doctor. That goes for financial quacks just as much as it does for medical ones.

Submissions for next 'Free Radical'

It's nearly time to start pulling together contributions for the next Free Radical magazine. If you have something you're already working on, or something you'd like to be working on -- something that simply has to be in the next magazine -- then let me know now, and start working towards the Feb 6 deadline.

Housing affordability: It's regulation, stupid

Since the news of New Zealand's leading position in the field of housing unaffordability is finally being digested, but unfortunately still with so many indigestible misconceptions, I thought I'd repost this concise summary of the reasons for rising housing costs produced by Pieter Burghout of the Master Builders Federation. He naturally overlooks the expected cost increases due to the senseless certification of builders and designers, but since planners, regulators and Alan Bollard have yet to focus on the real causes of that unaffordability, it's important that we do. I've retained my original introduction to the piece.

Demographia's worldwide survey of housing affordability demonstrates clearly enough that since all housing markets studied have similar tax and credit regimes but distinctly different policies on land regulation, the crucial factor in housing affordability is land regulation, not new taxes.

An editorial in the NZ Master Bulders' magazine Building Today highlights the problem perfectly with points keenly summarised in the graphs below (click on them to enlarge): over the last five years material costs have increased by twenty-five percent and labour costs by fifty percent (much of that due to the green-plated new building regs). Over that same time consent fees have increased by fifty percent, land costs have doubled, and levies and compulsory contributions levied by council have increased by ten times!

In dollar terms, the biggest increase is in the inflation of land costs due to regulation. In percentage terms the biggest increase is in infrastructure levies and fees. If that doesn't leave you incensed, then you're probably part of the problem. And if you think either are susceptible to interest rate increases then you must be Alan Bollard.

Because of its brevity it's worth reading Master Builders' CEO Pieter Burghout's piece in full (or nearly enough), so here it is:

Housing affordability -- it can be fixed!...0ne of the recent, big public issues has centred around housing affordability, with nearly everyone jumping on the bandwagon and suggesting how it can be fixed....For certain, Kiwis have aspired, and probably always will aspire, to own their own home — their own “quarter acre section of paradise”. And that’s entirely how it should be....Unfortunately, the lift in house prices over the past five or so years has put the average home out of the reach of the average Kiwi family, which is not good. […]...The construction industry, and New Zealand as a whole, benefits from having an affordable housing sector, and we believe there are a number of measures that can be taken to improve housing affordability....The main points we made in our submission to the [Select Committee Inquiry on Housing Affordability] are noted below. Our research, within New Zealand and offshore, validates that the key drivers of the housing affordability issue have been, in order of priority:

rises in land cost,

rises in local authority infrastructure levies and fees,

increasing compliance costs, and

increased labour and material costs.

...This analysis is shown in the graphs at right....And as the prices of new homes have risen, so have the prices of existing homes — because that’s how the market worksl...If these are the cost drivers behind house price increases, then what are the things that need to be done to fix them and make houses more affordable again?...First, the biggest factor affecting land cost is supply, and central and local government need to consider what measures can and should be taken to free up land availability, particularly in the main centres....Second, the biggest percentage increase in cost has been burgeoning increases in local authority infrastructure levies and fees. These should be better assessed and monitored to ensure they are fair and reasonable — rather than the “laissez faire” approach that applies currently. [It’s worth noting here that the Libertarianz submission on Sandra Lee’s expansion of local government powers pointed out at the time that good objective law allows individuals the right to do anything except that which is specifically prohibited while restraining governments to acting only on that which is specifically permitted, and that Lee’s Local Government Act reverses this important principle. The explosive consequences for the cost of local government that we’ve seen since the Act’s passing are entirely due to that reversal.]...The construction industry can and should pay for those extra infrastructure costs that it imposes, but it’s not fair that new home owners pay inflated infrastructure levies to subsidise existing home owners who otherwise have lower rates to pay...And third, the next largest significant increase has been in the area of compliance costs. Some of these costs are reasonable as the industry lifts overall quality levels since the leaky building saga, but some are unreasonable, and steps should be taken to reduce them, particularly:

...There have been increases in labour and material costs but, in our view, both of these are subject to strong competitive pressures across the industry and across the economy as a whole. We are generally comfortable with where these costs sit in perspective against the other cost drivers noted above....The final point we made in our submission to the Inquiry is that similar housing affordability issues apply in other countries, and New Zealand should take heed from the remedial measures being proposed in those countries to adopt what is applicable here....In nearly all the cases we researched, the three factors we have highlighted — land prices, infrastructure levies and compliance costs — are at the top of the list of things to fix. And so it should be in New Zealand, too....The problem won’t be fixed overnight, but it can be tackled, and we strongly encourage the Government to do so.

Here's the solution: get rid of fiat money, get rid of zoning, don't fight so-called sprawl and let people free to develop according to demand, and let development "end the divide between rural and urban areas" by having the council-imposed 'Urban Wall' removed.

Good luck getting either this Government or the planners responsible for the problem interested enough to care.

Plot, character and great drama, all in less than an hour-and-a-half (updated)

Half-a-dozen of us here last night watched two films and a TV programme. That might sound like a busy evening, but it wasn't. It only took an hour-and-a-half.

It only took an hour-and-a-half because the two films didn't take long to watch. Despite stars, spectacle and really big budgets both 'The Good German' and 'Black Dahlia' were execrable. They failed the fifteen minute test, offering no good reason we should watch them any further. If you haven't already seen them, my advice is 'don't bother.'

Not so the TV show, conveniently packaged on DVD. With no stars and a merely moderate budget, but with a script so tight it rivalled a fish's sphincter, in its one non-commercial hour the BBC's 'Spooks' showed how good drama is done, and just how good it is when done well.

As too many directors forget, It's the Story Stupid. 'The Good German' and the 'Black Dahlia' had George Clooney and Cate Blanchett and Scarlett Johansen and a host of other so called stars who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag even if they'd been given any lines worth delivering to help them out.

These two "modern noirs" are supposedly homages to the great film noirs of the forties and fifties, films like 'In a Lonely Place,' 'Double Indemnity,' 'The Third Man' or 'The Blue Dahlia' (the only similarity to 'The Black Dahlia is that they are both films), but unlike these classics today's tributes have no stories worth following, no characters worth caring about, and no actors able to impart the gravity that actors like Bogart and Stanwyck and Welles delivered so easily and (still) so memorably, and often with a touch of easy humour. Neither 'Good German' nor 'Black Dahlia' could even manage the humour, yet these are films that deserve to be roundly laughed at.

As with so many of today's films, the films' directors seem to have forgotten the basic elements of their craft, and their actors all-too obviously never had them. Watching 'Spooks' however was damn fine entertainment, and also a simple reminder of how important those basic elements are.

Nearly two-and-a-half thousand years ago Aristotle identified the six basic parts of any drama. In decreasing order of importance they are Plot, Characters, Theme, Dialogue, Rhythm (or Melody), and Spectacle*. In that order. Without a plot to follow and characters to care about, neither spectacle nor melody can save a drama. Two millennia and a century of film technology hasn't changed that, no matter how much CGI you might be able to afford.

It's the first two of Aristotle's elements that truly characterise good drama -- that is, Plot and Character. With all the technology now available to film-makers however, it's now the last two in his list that dominate contemporary films, with 'Spectacle' generally and mind-numbingly considered the most important, and a sumptuous score used to bolster the empty bravado. “Superior poets rely on the inner structure of the play rather than spectacle,"observed Aristotle, however “the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.” It's no accident that "stage machinists" and soundtrack simpletons are highly valued in Hollywood while the "poets" are striking for better pay and recognition of their talents, and no wonder most of what's produced there is so teeth-achingly dull. With nothing to integrate the explosions, the car chases and the lingering 'artistic' shots of most of today's films whether art-house or shit-house, there's nothing to do but either nod off or turn off. Last night we turned off, and turned on 'Spooks' instead.

By crikey, this show is good. With none of the megabudget resources available to most of today's film-makers, the show's creators rely instead on Aristotle's first two elements, and like the classic noir films they do them superbly: the Characters are sympathetic, well drawn and given enough light and depth to emerge from the thematic shadows -- they are agents in both the fully volitional and the MI5 sense; and their Plots are sharp and well-integrated and relentless -- you mustn't blink for fear of missing a crucial plot point.

With 'Spooks,' the plot is always king, and this holds true for every episode of every season -- a remarkable achievement.

What makes a good plot wasn't news to noir's lions and isn't news to the makers of 'Spooks,' although it's clearly news that's now been lost in L.A.: in three words, it's Dramatic Conflict, and Integration. Without a decent dramatic conflict, there is no plot. Without tight integration of all elements, you can't bring the drama into focus. And once you have a well-written and well-integrated dramatic conflict, you don't need to spend a fortune on Spectacle.

You'd think budget-conscious producers would value that simple formula. The rarity of shows as sharp as 'Spooks' and the flatulence of so many films shows it's something so many have still to learn. Until they do, I'll keep ignoring most of what they produce. _ _ _ _ _ _ _

* Here, for your future viewing pleasure, are Aristotle's six elements along with explanatory quotes from his Poetics whence they come:

Plot (muthos): “the combination of the incidents, or things done in the story.”

Character (êthé): “what makes us ascribe certain qualities to the agents.”

Thought/Theme (dianoia): "all they say when proving a particular point or, it may be, enunciating a general truth...”

Dialogue/Diction (lexis): "the externalisation of the internal order of the fable..." “What indeed would be the good of the speaker if things appeared in the required light even apart from anything he says?”

Melody (mélopoia)

Spectacle (opsis)

About these last two Aristotle says but little, regarding them "as having more to do with how the tragedy is performed, as opposed to its actual content."

UPDATE: I loved novelist Ed Cline's review of the Will Smith blockbuster 'I Am Legend.' With characteristic economy -- and a useful integration with my own post -- the review is titled "I am Plotless," and begins:

For a change of pace, offered here is a movie review. Warning: there are no plot-spoilers in this review; there is no plot to spoil... I suspected this movie would be talked about ... given the critical imprimatur. However, it is a B movie inflated by modern film technology (chiefly CGI, or computer generated imagery) with the intention of making it a blockbuster. But, fundamentally, it isn't any better than Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space.

The details or concretes one chooses to show or include in a story must have a purpose, that is, they must be integrated into the plot, they must have a demonstrable place or a role in the logical sequence of events. If they are included, but not explained, or are there just for "special effects" to impress or mislead a reader or viewer, or are included simply at the whim of a writer or director, then they violate Louis Sullivan's rule that form must follow function, or Ayn Rand's rule of essentialization. A plot itself, by Rand's definition, is "a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax."

I am Legend is a cinematic jigsaw puzzle most of whose pieces do not connect. There is a "climax," but no logic to it. Among its many other faults, it is an epistemological abomination, and the horrible thing about it is that I don't believe the film's makers consciously intended that. Its illogic reflects the state of their epistemology. And since their epistemology (and metaphysics) is a subjectivist shambles, to them logic and causal-connections are elective elements not absolutely requisite to solving the problem of the moment.

Let us examine the film story of I am Legend, based on Richard Matheson's 1954 science fiction novel of the same title...

One assumes this to be a subtle advertorial on behalf of the "chic new hotel" (I'm suspicious like that), but since it allows me to link again to posts on some of my favourite Wright buildings, how much harm can it do.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Pests

Mrs Smith makes a sighting in the wild of a rapidly growing pest, the genus Urban Brat. "I wish I could say that this semi-feral species of the urban child is rare," she says, "but indeed, their population seems to be increasing. Thus, any school-leavers wondering which field to study at university, might be strongly advised to pursue psychiatry. I think this may be a booming industry in the next decade." You've been warned.

Greenmongering pits poor against planet

Pictured above is the world's cheapest car: the Tata Nano. The entry level model retails at just US$2500. Its makers hope to sell over a million Nanos a year, and at that price and in one of the world's most populated markets, you wouldn't bet against them. The market for which the Nano is intended and in which it will be built is India. Ratan Tata, the entrepreneur responsible, told Time magazine he expects it to revolutionise life for poorer families:

Tata hopes the Nano will help millions of poor people around the world — the "Bottom of the Pyramid" in developing world marketing-speak —switch from two wheels to four.

It's impossible to overstate the boon for the word's poor of such a car. As Brendan O'Neill says at Sp!ked Online, instead of "having to rely on overcrowded, unpredictable public transport or sweating everywhere by pushbike," "millions of people in the developed and very quickly developing world [can instead enjoy] the freedom, flexibility and – yes – status offered by a car."

This could transform India. If the railways, a byproduct of British colonialism, served India well in the twentieth century, then the rise of a new car culture could change the face and feel of India in the twenty-first. Millions more people will have steady, relatively well-paid jobs on car production lines; miles and miles of new roads and motorways will be constructed to accommodate the new motorised middle classes; and the average Joe Patel will enjoy greater speed and liberty in his everyday life courtesy of the affordable car. The People’s Car: one short drive for a man, one giant leap for mankind!

It's all good, you would think: A win-win situation for everyone from Mr Tata to the dirt poor of India's dusty streets. Not so. The same kind of people who have between them made the developed world's houses more and more unaffordable bemoan this boon as "planet threatening" -- as far as the world's poor are concerned they say (just as Marie Antoinette might have said), "Let them all walk."

What [impoverished buyers] foolishly and selfishly think of as a wonderful opportunity to get their mitts on the steering wheel of a super-cheap four-wheeler is actually the latest instance of human destructiveness against the planet [notes O'Neill]. ... as one British newspaper points out, while the launch of The People’s Car has been greeted with ‘zeal’ by India’s middle classes and aspirant working classes, it has been greeted with ‘worry’ from the environmentalist lobby, which is disgusted by the ‘unbridled enthusiasm’ of ordinary Indians for the super-cheap car, and which predicts ‘a plague of ever-cheaper cars and ever-swelling clouds of climate-changing fumes.’ The People’s Car will apparently have ‘drastic consequences for pollution.' Those dirty Indians. Environmentalists’ discomfort with The People’s Car throws into stark relief one of their core convictions: that the developing world must not achieve the same standard of living or level of wealth as we in the West enjoy, because if it does the Earth will perish.

Once again, global greenmongering puts at risk global prosperity, this time for those who need it most. And once again we see their global crusade pitting their planetary aspirations ahead of real people and their own push for prosperity. "As a used-car salesman in New Delhi said when The People’s Car was launched: ‘It’s the same dream anywhere in the world. You want a good home, a good car and a beautiful wife'." But that's not a dream the "eco-miserabilists" want these uppity brown people to have. As O'Neill concludes,

However much green activists use the word ‘rich’ and ‘middle class’ as terms of abuse, there’s no disguising the fact that these Westernised, white-led campaign groups are lecturing brown people for getting ideas above their station – or above their station wagon, in the case of The People’s Car.

In his book All the Trouble in the World, PJ O'Rourke pointed out the covert racism of all the hand-wringing about the "population explosion" back when the population was supposed to be exploding, and we were all supposed to be worrying. That myth was largely exploded by Julian Simon in his book The Ultimate Resource, a reviewer of which makes the same point as O'Rourke and O'Neill:

Pervading the anti-growth movement is the miasma of racism, as evinced by this extract from The Population Bomb quoted in The Ultimate Resource: "I came to understand the population explosion emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi...The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping, people visiting, arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people." You can almost hear it: "my dear, the natives, they were everywhere. Beastly, smelly people, little better than rats". The fact that these "human pollutants" have just as much right to existence as any one of us seems to escape the population doomsayers.

The doomsayers haven't disappeared, neither has their (still) unacknowledged dirty secret -- and nor have they yet accepted that reviewer's ultimate point.

Safety clothing essential

A man on the job is a man in need of some serious workwear. This spicey, satirical commercial [moderately NSFW] got Britain's Daily Mail readers all hot and bothered when, 'twas reported, pupils at a private school discovered their English teacher Sarah Green was featured in the "'shocking soft-porn" ad for hard-wearing workwear. Fortunately, exposure such as this from the Mail has meant inattentive pupils and blog readers like yourself who hadn't yet seen the clip won't miss out.

Welcome to the land of milk and honey ... and the world's most unaffordable housing

Several years on from New Zealand's housing affordability problems becoming all but obvious, they've now gone past being serious and becoming tragic. Auckland and Wellington might rank just eighteenth equal in a survey of the world's most liveable cities, but measured against our incomes New Zealand cities now top the polls as the most unaffordable places in the developed world in which to buy a home. Where it takes less that ten years work for household on the median income to buy a median-priced house in Ireland, the US and Canada, it takes the NZ's middle-income household nearly twenty years! [Herald story here. Worldwide housing affordability study here at the Demographia site.]

Little wonder. As income levels elsewhere have been soaring, wages in this pathetic authoritarian backwater have failed to keep pace (see graph at right, and story here). Meanwhile -- as demand for housing continues to soar -- when regulators aren't making it well-nigh impossible for builders and developers to build and develop on the land they own, planners are making it well-nigh impossible to buy land on which anyone is even allowed to contemplate building and developing. [See many, many previous posts here on Building, Housing, Sprawl, Urban Design and the RMA.]

Both rural and urban land is in huge demand for development; but the supply of land has been effectively nationalised. Our cities have been ring-fenced by eco-zealots eager to calcify rural New Zealand into a bucolic museum, while within our cities (which represent just 1.4% of the country's land) restrictions on land supply and the development of that land is severely restricted, and the choice of housing types severely limited. (Greater London area is about the same size as Greater Auckland, for example, yet while London houses over ten million people in a mixture of terrace housing, walk-up apartments and tower blocks, Auckland is home to just over one million -- and as Auckland's planners argue against the sprawl their policies induce, they severely restrict the density within the city that their restrictive ring-fencing demands.)

The result of these restrictions on building and on land supply is that New Zealand needs around 35,000 houses a year to keep up with demand, while home builders are restricted to producing just 24,000 houses every year -- and thanks to the explosion of building regulations and the increasing emigration of skilled builders, each of those houses costs much more to produce than it ever has, on land that is more expensive than it's ever been.

The real culprit here isn't the council officers or planners or regulators who make the plans that restrict the supply of land and the ability of bui9lders to develop it for would-be home-owners; the real culprits are the Resource Management Act that gives planners and regulators the power over other people's property, and a culture that assumes that local governments need planners and regulators to plan and control.

This lack of clearsightedness is perhaps because the situation seems irredeemable -- which it is, unless the red-tinted glasses of the planners and their acolytes are removed. A similar problem is easy to see in the traffic jams that snarl up our cities, which as Andrew Galambos says are "a collision between free enterprise and socialism. Free enterprise produces automobiles faster than socialism can build roads and road capacity."

That same collision of capitalism and socialism in our daily traffic jams is ever present too in NZ's severely unaffordable housing markets: a bubble inflated by the freewheeling demands of prosperity and credit and new immigration colliding with a simultaneous suffocation of supply by the socialism of the state. At a time when greater supply is desperately needed to mop up exploding demand, 'planners' -- those throwbacks to the failed central planning regimes of socialist states -- are throttling the supply lines we do have.

It's time that unemployment was urgently increased, among the fraternity of planners who have condemned New Zealand's home-owners to half a lifetime of paying off their houses.

UPDATE: As reader Wayne points out, with the usual suspects busy patching up their server stories, there's an unusually good thread on this topic at Kiwiblog.

Liars at large

This election year, individuals have been severely restricted in the amounts they can spend opposing government policies -- meanwhile, the Clark Government has spent record amounts of your money fitting out government departments with spin doctors to trumpet its own lies. [Story here.]While individuals are confined to spending $120,000 over the whole year in a national campaign (or just $10,000 in a local campaign), government departments now boast a whopping 448 spin doctors -- 210 more than just five years ago, and nearly ten times the number of the mid-eighties -- who cost us the sum of $47 million, not including the cost of campaigns these lying arseholes dream up.

This is where your tax dollars go to, while the sound of protest is muzzled.

Remember last year when a huge taxpayer-funded advertising splurge trumpeted the government's Kiwisaver, Student Loans and Welfare for Working Families election bribes? You and I paid for that. Remember all the lies and spin fed to you by the Clark Government-- lies and spin about smacking your children, about the Electoral Finance Bill, about their pledge card ... You and I paid for all that too, and they plan for you to keep right on paying, election after election, while being muzzled in how much we can pay to protest.

The explosion of spin under the Clark regime and of the liars who are paid to do it mirrors a similar explosion in lying and spin in Tony Blair's New Labour. The pledge card wasn't the only thing NZ Labour borrowed from UK New Labour. They've also borrowed their mendacity. As Peter Oborne notes in writing of the rise and rise of political lying in Britain, the reliance on spin and the volume of its is a new phenomenon in politics.

All governments have contained liars, and most politicians deceive each other as well as the public from time to time. But in recent years [under New Labour] mendacity and deception have ceased to be abnormal and become an entrenched feature of the British [political] system.

The institutionalisation of spin is almost complete, here as it is in Britain.

Records Ruth Laugesen in yesterday's Sunday Star Times, the number of spin doctors is at a record high. "Government agencies have hired more new communications staff in five years than all the journalists working at Television New Zealand, Radio New Zealand, the Sunday Star-Times and the Dominion Post newspapers put together." As Gerry Brownlee points out, this leaves them ideally placed to use the machinery of government as its personal campaign for re-election.

In the last election the Clark Government thought they could use taxpayer's money intended to run the Prime Minister's office in order to run for the Prime Minister's Office. This was what paid for their pledge card. This election they clearly intend to use every "communications" resource in every government department they can lay their hands on to run for re-election. This is the reason the Madeleine Setchell/Clair Curran employment saga was so important (the only reason): it's important to the Clark Government that the have loyal "communications staff" are in place in every department. With the numbers Laugesen quotes, it's clear that the capture of the public service is all but complete.

"The Ministry of Social Development topped the list with 54 communications staff and contractors, making it bigger than Radio New Zealand's entire workforce of journalists."

"The biggest spender on communication contractors and staff was the Ministry of Education, with 70% of the $6.6m it spent going on contractors."

"There are 10 times as many government "communications staff" as there were 25 years ago, despite a smaller public service."

Not included in this number is the cost of bloggers such as the hacks at the Sub-Standard, who spin this news by arguing that it's not that there are too many spin doctors but too few journalists -- echoing a line used by Helen Clark at a journalism conference last December, and doing it on Labour's ticket. (As Paul M. points out in the comments at Kiwiblog, the Sub-Standard is hosted on the Labour Party's server, but without the parliamentary crest that's supposed to appear on taxpayer-funded pieces of puffery such as this is, leaving a few questions for the Sub-Standard boys and girls to answer, including who exactly pays their wages, and for what purpose.)

Watch out people. There are liars out there, and you're paying for them.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

An atheist in a foxhole

It's said that there are no atheists in a foxhole. When it comes time to stare death in the face, one's thoughts are supposed to turn to the hereafter, and to God. This is all nonsense, says blogger Annie Fox. With cancer placing her in that metaphorical foxhole for much of last year, she says there are most definitely atheists in foxholes - "and I’m one of them."

Although I did not want to die so young, I was not afraid of dying. But my lack of fear is not why I’m an atheist--even if I was terrified at the prospect of dying, I’d still be atheist. I'm an atheist because that is the only rational possibility. I actually think I could turn the foxhole scenario around and say that on a sunny day at the beach all believers are atheists. The only reason I can fathom that they cling to their belief, is fear: fear of dying, or fear that life does not have that certain meaning, or fear that without religious structure life would be too chaotic, or fear that their family and friends would shun them should they not follow like sheep. What kind of horrible mental gymnastics must this take - to dispel all the facts around you and cling to the impossible, just because you are afraid - sounds like a quick path to mental illness.

The premise of religionists that religion provides "hope" in times of trouble is an illusion built upon sophistry and lies. To found one's hope upon a fiction--in denial of the obvious facts around you--is the worst kind of fraud. At such times, relentless focus upon the facts is what saves you, not shroud-waving and false hope. As she concludes, one of the jobs of hospital security guards should be "to throw out religious vultures that prey on the scared and venerable in times of stress."

Tip Jar

In America, they tip. In NZ, we shout beer. If you like the service here at Not PC, drop a tip in the tip jar and you can do both.

Recent
Comments

Wine O'Clock
I hope Graham Brazier's music is a whole lot better than his standard of english. I had a quick look at the 'Hello Sailor' site to which you linked and clicked on his name....

With no dates in the first three paragraphs and garbled grammar and almost undecipherable sentence construction, this stands out as probably the worst-written bio I have ever read.

Anyway, he is probably quite a good musician, and the setting sounds nice, so enjoy :-)
Oops... sorry. He doesn't seem to be a good musician.

I had a listen to some of the samples and it sounds like he belongs to the heavy-handed unsubtle thrash school of Kiwi noise with overbearing drums failing to compensate for a lack of melodic structure.

Ahh, the peace and tranquility of a vineyard in summer, eh..? What a pity... Hope the lyrics make sense...
There are fewer sadder sights than pedants playing Canute with the tide of language change.

Brazier is an excellent poet as well as musician. Wasted on you, perhaps.

These comments are another sign of the intellectual superiority of the blogosphere...eh?

Like the Dr Phil critique of John Key's beach house...eh?

You know, a lot of people are under the impression they're thought leaders because they dick around at political blogs. Reality seems to be somewhat different.
As Herman Hesse observed in "The Glass Bead Game', the music that a society produces says volumes about its state of development.

Graham Brazier's music sounds (to me) like an ugly cacophanous noise devoid of melody or subtlety of any kind. It is, indeed, totally wasted on me.

Mine is, of course, a completely subjective judgement, but as I have no intention of seeking work as a music critic for, say, the Listener, I don't expect a full endorsement of my views, hahaha!

As for the 'tide of language change', perhaps this is the equivalent route in language as the 'music' is taking. The Canute motif is colourful but inaccurate. The tide seems to be going out, rather than in.

Anyway... I pity the neighbours of this vineyard if they are within 5 kms of the stage.
Brazier and Mcartney?!?! ..gosh...it is not quite Beethoven and Wagner, is it?

Still, I am happy to encourage working class people in profitmaking undertakings, however cringe-inducing, and hope the weekend goes well.

I shall be tuned to Concert FM as usual...
Elijah, what a snobby euro-elitist you are, lol! I'll be doing my bit to support Kiwi music. I'll be listening to my Voxnova and Pitch Black CDs. Vonova while cooking the dinner and Pitch Black to unwnid with a glass of wine during and afterwards. Concert FM indeed! :-)
Oh yes, Dave... 'Elijah, what a snobby euro-elitist you are, lol!'...sums me up rather well..lol

If there are two things I cannot stand it is poor people, foreigners and 'pop' music!
OTOH maybe PC meant it when he said "It should be an awful experience"

Even with all the bozos on the internet he found you Lineberry and gave you a platform, so my bad, I guess.

Nothing surprises me anymore.
So, how was it, Peter? hehehehe....
The demise of the Head Bureaucrat
There may be a good side to the fact that bureaucrats get paid so damn much to do so little, inefficiency can be good! This from an address, Economic Freedom, Human Freedom, Political Freedom, given by Milton Friedman, at the Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies in 1991.

"The United States today is more than 50% socialist in terms of the fraction of our resources that are controlled by the government. Fortunately, socialism is so inefficient that it does not control 50% of our lives. Fortunately, most of that is wasted. People worry about government waste; I don't. I just shudder at what would happen to freedom in this country if the government were efficient in spending our money."
Oh, indeed. I'd rather most were paid fifty percent more to do one-hundred percent less.
(Tongue slightly in cheek)

1. You pay these salaries because you *can*, not something the private sector can do without subsidies.

2. Who else is going to employ those with a degree in basket weaving? Or social policy or whatever.

3. Public servants are hard to sack, and one way to meet the diversity targets is simply to over employ to get the correct mix.

4. If a policy isn't popular, you don't have the proper number of "communicators".

5. The actual number of people in the trading departments has fallen. This allows you to employ more people in the social depts.

6. What do you think "sustainability" means?

JC
Health problems?

I imagine there was something sticking in his throat.

I assume his successor will adhere to Helengrad's "obedience over talent" policy.
JC : Who else is going to employ those with a degree in basket weaving...

Isn't that what Dr Cindy Kiro's PhD in (ie, basket weaving) ?
Flame warriors
Oh dear, I foolishly clicked the link and my worst fears about myself were confirmed in the brightness of a billion pixels. I have been more and more concerned about my blog commenting for quite some time now. perhaps a period of quiet contemplation is in order.I shall blog on this myself, hat tip included obviously...
Priceless!
Student loans won't cost very much. Yeah, right.
Are you not forgetting that the loans are taken out to PAY for education.

2 questions:1) What were the fees for your degree?2) Did you get an allowance when you were studying?
I worked my way through my degree. I paid more each year in tax than I ever got in allowances.
PC, show some respect. Please list me in front of the National Party pinkos in description next time.
It's scary how close the Herald story is to the press release http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/ED0801/S00025.htm

A stuff article has the offical loan figures: up 25% owing over two years (doesn't say to when).

A lot of it is actually does seem to be bank debt.

At $150p/w there's only so much maxing out of a student loan you can do.
Peter,

Total average debt for students has risen by 54% since 2004. The TNS Conversa research includes Credit Cards, Overdrafts, Personal Loans, etc (but not mortgages)in its total. This is more to do with easy credit, dodgy banks, and a general lack of student support than the removal of interest.

Churr
'Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer' - Rembrandt
Is this the same Aristobabble guy you were talking about the other day? Crikey. What a boring looking guy.

And the bust of Homer looks nothing like Homer. Homer has only three hairs, no beard, and his head is much more yellow.

This is what happens when you post high-falutin' crap like that on the interweb, PC. People will mock you and ridicule you.
Your name is wisely chosen IP.
If this is humour, IP, may I recommend some lessons?This comment has been removed by the author.
I am sure Insolent thinks we have been talking about Aristotle Onassis...(!)
Here's a "New World" response to Homer, well sort of!

Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.

John Keats. 1795–1821

634. On first looking into Chapman's Homer

MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 5 That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne: Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; 10Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

I've been to a spot near there, and the guy I was with started quoting this poem as we "stared at the Pacific". I chimed in as best I could.

PC,

Thanks for lifting the IQ/cultural level of the Internet (and this includes the Beer posts . . . but then my PhD dissertation was about Beer and Shakespeare!).

If I ever make it to The Antipodes, we definitely need to hoist a pint or however many.

BTW, that's The Pacific behind me at Pescadero State Beach in Northern California back when I was deeply thinking about Shakespeare, the Dutch and Kentish hops.
Counterfeit capital
"Government cannot create genuine spending power; the most it can do is to transfer it from Smith to Jones."

In fact, a government does less than that: some of the transfer is lost as transaction fees, i.e. the cost of the bureaucracy that effects the transfer.
When I was a young child I wondered why the government didn't just give everybody free money (sinse they control the mints).

Now that I am older I understand why. Dissapointingly there still seem to be some people who do not understand that more money does not equal more wealth.This comment has been removed by the author.This comment has been removed by the author.
transfer in this respect is best described as theft.
Hi PC,

One question: where did the capital originate from? I think you'll find it started life as credit as most money does.

Without doubt the regulators should take responsibility for running such a shoddy financial system allowing paper to be printed all over the place by banks with very little restriction.

Most of the money supply is debt in one form or another. My savings are merely someone else's debt.

For example:

I buy a property for $1m taking out a loan for $900,000 plus $100,000 of savings. Some time later i sell it for $2m.

I repay the loan and have $1.1m in savings.

The person who bought the property borrows $1.8m from the bank plus $200,000 in savings.

So i have savings of $1.1m now but the other guy has a debt of $1.8m....the money supply has been increased via debt increase.

98% of all money is interest bearing debt whichever way you want to slice it.

As we are seeing now the system is so overloaded with this "money" that it is starting to eat itself.
what do you expect from people who believe that the world was created in 7 days?

the Republican candidates were asked on that U-Tube q and a session whether they believed everything written in the bible. With the exception of Giuliani, they all said yes they did.

So... what do you expect? common sense?
'Friend' - Hone Tuwhare
He was a wonderful poet. Just so evocative and lovely.
Now that is nice, shame he got overshadowed by Hillary. Not that I have anything against Ed, it's just, you know.
Hello. I am working in this poem for school. Can you tell me what's the name of the book and the year that Hone Tuwhare published this poem?

Thank you. I hope you respond my message.
@ Anonymous, “Friend” is from Hone Tuwhare’s 1958 book “No Ordinary Sun.”
i'm working on this for a school assessment, can anyone help me with techniques and the main idea in the poem "friend"? would be a great help. thanks
Spin is still in
What is truly maddening, besides the fact I had to re-type the start of this sentence thanks to blogger.com bizarre page loading, is that blogging supporters of Labour can barely see or acknowledge the hypocrisy, preferring instead to argue that two wrongs make a right, or that no real money is involved, or that blah blah blah. And then, in KBB's case, immediately put up a post accusing National of secret ties to some organisation (which, on being challenged, turn out to be entirely made up). It annoys me intensely and scares the shit out of me that the mind of a Labour supporter is so willing to abandon any principle in defence of their party. Win at any cost, apparently.
Mike Williams just shafted the all the toadies at the Standard, talk about loyality among thieves....
We have two rules in this country pc. One for us, one for them. No way this would happen.
Ronald Reagan's war
I read a good book by Bob Woodward in the late 1980s about the war in Afghanistan that the CIA was at the forefront of that war. They trained the mujahadeen and supplied them with weapons, especially the stingers that were so effective in downing Russians fighters and attack choppers. It has been widely mentioned that one of the reason the Soviets were losing that war because of the stingers.

Bob Woodward's book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 about William Casey , (the CIA Director during Reagan - It was Casey's war). Charlie Wilson's frequent trips to Afghanistan (briefly mentioned in the book) were done on the guidance of the CIA operatives and their Afghan informants. I am keen to see this movie when it comes out.
Yes, well said, Falafulu, I was going to post about that book by Woodward earlier, but had to pop out to a meeting.

Someone deserves a slap for tainting my memory of the sublime Honor Blackman in Goldfinger with that unfortunate image. :)
Russia's fall had more to do with sabotaged pipleline equipment we sold them, that blew up and cut off their natural gas supply and not very much to do with Afghanistan.
Politics is broken...
Hey PC

I'm dead sexy. Where do I sign up?
Alina is proof positive there is a God!Alina working for Putin is also proof of the fall of Adam!Comrade Wikiriwhi
....meanwhile, down in NZ, the Kiwis have Helen.

LGM
Sean F.

Without wishing to challenge your assertion at all, you do realise there are TWO qualifications required?
More steroids please
P.C' Have you herd of the book..."The Puritan Gift" by Kenneth Hopper & William Hopper, 2007 ?I saw an interview on BBC World 'Hard talk' which was very interesting.This book has been called the 'Must read' on economics for 2007 and aside from its main thesis that Puritanism was the main force behind Western/ global Capitalism, It praised corporations like IBM and General Electric and was also is very critical of the misuse of credit.In the interview it said the current financial failures of financial institutions (Losses etc) are "as if to validate the book".That is as much as I can tell you about it.Tim Wikiriwhi

Tim Wikiriwhi
Yes, it was a bizarre and stupid move by the US Federal Reserve.

They should face realities and simply let markets crash and allow the resulting 'depression' to take place...(Andrew Mellon wisely followed this course of action in 1929/30).

Apart from the obvious benefits of another Great Depression...(namely, large numbers of poor people being destitute and large numbers of ghastly middle class people becoming poor people)...it will end the 25 years of instability in many financial markets, and encourage more rational behaviour all round.

(On the other hand, when interest rates were cut earlier this morning, I was long in gold at $853-40, the gold price soared to $890-00 and I made a killing..so...what do I care?)
The Down Jones doesn't look too impressed today.
Elijah said...They should face realities and simply let markets crash and allow the resulting 'depression' to take place.

Can academics predict the market?
'The Road to Wisdom' - Piet Hein
Erring can be most enjoyable....but most of us run out of the energy to do it. Then we call it "wisdom". Neat:-)
Merger news
Hahahahaha! I loved this. "Fairwell Honeychild"!
Mr PC, are you a financial advisor? I used to be a Chancellor of an Exchequer, but got promoted. Can you tell me, should I put my money into gold?
Submissions for next 'Free Radical'
Um check the date on that post PC
Gosh! Peter! the game is up!

Everyone now realises you are a Time Traveller and are coming to us from the future...
May I sell you a tip for tomorrow's three-thirty at Ellerslie?
Housing affordability: It's regulation, stupid
That is an interesting comment from your previous post.

It identifies the two main issues here which are land and bank created credit. Add the two together and you get speculation and huge rent profits.

I'm astounded at the doubling of land prices in NZ in the last 5 years. Has the population suddenly doubled?

I'd like to recommend an excellent book on the subject. It's a scholarly piece of work which examines land speculation over the last 400 years as well as clear 18 year boom/bust cycles. It's a real eye opener.

It's called "Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010" by Fred Harrison.

Fred predicted the 1992 recession in the UK years in advance and wrote about it and the reasons for it in many places.

The US sub-prime meltdown is the red flag for the coming depression. Global stock markets at all time highs, the US$ in a serious downtrend, global inflation concerns and oil/war round off the other warning signals.

Just one leg remains on this collapsing table and that is the Chinese economy.

All of this down to land speculation and banks printing money to pay for it.
That makes for a depressing future really. When it occurs many hurt people will misguidedly call for more government regulation of the economy. More central bank fun and rorting. More of what caused the troubles in the first place.

If I wasn't an honest man I'd be in there with the rorting. Perhaps I should consign morality to the dustbin and get while the getting is good.

Banker
If that lesbian Minister of Housing wants housing to be more affordable...a good way to do it would be to require all Valuation Reports to reflect the 'immediate' sale price rather than the optimistically theoretical 'values' you get at the moment.

Needless to say, this would lead to a substantial number of people having 'Negative Equity' and mortgagee sales..and..presto! immediate housing affordability.
your raging against percentage increases is irrelvant.

the fact is that the largest contributors to construction cost are still land cost, materials and labour cost.

land cost increases have more to do with supply and demand - and the speculation that comes with this.

furthermore - to state that new developments are funding old is rubbish - financial contributions are built up based on the cost of servicing new development - i know as i have been involved in both building these up as an employee of a council and also challenged them as a homebuilder

the alternative is for existing ratepayers to subsidise new developments which is not on.

additionally these contributions can be challenged and often are - so they need to be robust.

for the record i am building and am paying through the nose for the "pleasure" - and while i wish it was more affordable, blaming the affordability on land / govt policy is misleading, when the bottom line is that we are where we are due to a recent (and also long and oft repeated) history of speculation and greed...
Plot, character and great drama, all in less than an hour-and-a-half (updated)
This is why people don't take you seriously, PC. All this pontificating, snooty analysis makes you look like Russell Brown's skinnier twin. Next you'll be heralding Aunty Helen's contribution to the Arts.

Just summarise the bloody thing. Good German and Black Dahlia crap film, Spooks great show.

By applying the high-falutin' analysis some old Greek wanker left for you, you would conclude that Mr and Mrs Smith is a shit film. When in fact, as we all know, it's the greatest film ever made.
I think it is you without any credibility, Insolent.

Funnily enough, I took several staff and friends to the Good German last year.

I loved it due to knowing a lot of the background to the Potsdam events, and having read rather widely some of the things going on.

Everyone else was bored to tears and glad when it finished! LOL!!
Aristotle as applied to a George Clooney film, beyond classic.What's next Rand on Boney M?
IP: YOU mean yo know people who don't take me seriously! I'm appalled. You must find better friends.

ELIJAH: I found knowing the history neither helped nor hindered watching it, but the natural comparison to make was with 'Third Man' -- Nazi city in rubble; post war occupation; new guy in town; femme fatale; film noir -- and on that basis 'Good German' is a certified stinker.

CRAIG: Stay tuned, eh. :-)
PC,

You've just destroyed any reputation you had to having any good taste.

Fuck that Aristobabble dude. If he'd seen Mr and Mrs Smith he would have rewritten his formula. But he didn't see it. Why? Because he's DEAD! He died at least two hundred years ago. Why you keep quoting him when he's so irrelevant now astonishes me.
Yes, he died 200 years ago...I remember reading about how Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon used to have late night discussions with Aristotle in the early 1800s.

This was at a time when Aristotle was recovering from wounds he received fighting in the US War of Independence.

By pointing this out Insolent has added even further to my view of his credibility....
I've heard of that brandy guy Napolean, but I don't know about Jefferson. Was he the bourbon guy? Anyway I don't see how a bunch of old boozers having a meeting with a stupid old greek fart has anything to do with films.

I think most people would agree that Peter's talking out of his arse when he says that Mr and Mrs Smith wasn't the greatest film ever made.
I loved the film Mr and Mrs Smith, the explosions, the shootings, modern gadgets & electronic devices designed using modern state-of-the-art Physics. I have seen this movie 3 times, an excellent one.
Finally, my view of this blog has gone up a notch, with the stunning and lucid comment from Falafulu Fisi.

Fala, I'm thinking you have too much taste for this blog.

Fa'a, Fala.
Didn't Socrates top himself after just 5 minutes with Aristotle?

I think it all stemmed from a visit to the Oracle at Delphi. Socrates asked which would be the better movie: Mr and Mrs Smith or some low budget "kill the emperor" with plot twists about as convoluted as a slide rule set on Pythagoras's theorem.

He said "Mr and Mrs Smith" and Aristotle reasoned that because he hadn't seen it, it didn't exist and therefore he'd go with the low budget flick.

The Oracle confirmed that Socrates was wisest for acknowledging that a film he'd never seen was better than the crap offered up by the Athenian Playwright Association (of which Aristotle was a junior member), and the next thing you know it's a cup of hemlock and Goodbye Pork Pie.

Mr and Mrs Smith.
Meh... putting Aristotle aside, 'The Black Dahlia' is a masterclass in how not to adapt a novel for the screen.

I'm a huge fan of James Ellroy - but what I love about his work is literary not cinematic: the distinctive 'voice' of his prose, the plots that sprawl over years and where a double cross is far too simple, and great chunks of internal monologue.

Compare and contrast 'LA Confidential' (1997 - dir. Curtis Hanson, scr. Hanson & Brian Helgland) who did it right. As Hanson put it himself, a literal transcription of Ellroy's novel would have been several hundred hours long, literally required a cast of thousands and been utterly incomprehensible. 'LA Confidential' isn't a flawless film, but at least it does work as a film. 'The Black Dahlia' is just a mess.
I'm a bit leery of appealing to Aristotle, not least because you don't seem to need to.

And looking at the definitions I don't think Aristotle meant by his elements what we understand by the translations. I really think the greatest of noir classics would be all screwed up as far as the Most Famous Greek Philosopher would be concerned.

Its not like a (prototype) academic writing after the fact about classical tragedy is necessarily going to help with modern drama. For instance, if someone actually stuck to the unities, that would be news.

That said I'm entirely in favour of a good story well told; the List you have there actually seems kind of useful.
kihidlkpI like "Snatch". Have you guys seen that? I have watched it about 8 times. I would have watched it more, but it's a region 1 disk and my DVD seems to have gone all regional 4 on me.

It has Brad Pitt in it, just like Mr & Mrs Smith. Although Snatch has no, err, actual snatch in it, the quality of the swearing is far superior to the Smiths.
Ah, that's why the vrerification didn't work the first time. I'm not as good with the computers as my grandfather was lead to believe.
He is Dead
Oh come on. For goodness sake, bury the man and cease all this maudlin nonsense. He did a few things but he really was not all that important or impressive. in fact, there was a lot not to admire. Move on, please.

LGM
I loved this one-liner from Peter Hillary's eulogy:

"My father," he said, "was the only man I knew who regularly travelled overseas with a prefabricated building in his baggage."
Contrary lgm, he did a lot of respect-worthy things. He deserves the respect that he has been awarded. True, the media has been nothing more than a wet dribbiling mess on the subject of his death, but then again, it's not like our media ever gives us any worthwhile news anyway.

Tell me lgm, who do you think is a person worthwhile to give all this attention to?
LGM he did have some wonderful achievments - but never forget he was a SPORTING hero. NZers hate intellectuals.

The man chugging beer and munching pies in the public bar is our hero, you know.

Nice poem.
You are talking about Heath Ledger, aren't you?
Five best places to hangout if you're a Frank Lloyd Wright fan
Pests
It is a good case for employing a Nanny, and sending the children to strictly regimented Boarding Schools for 8 years...in order to turn out 'proper' chaps who know how to behave.
Greenmongering pits poor against planet
Good post. Agree about the traditional Green racism that pollutes our planet.

This little car will eventually reduce pollution in India as it replaces the old fleet.

Now all we need is a similar car for 3rd world NZ to render our 2nd hand Jap imports obsolete.

As an aside.. why does the somewhat affluent Jenetic Fitz on her farmlet milking a cow remind me of a fulfillment of the McGillicuddy Serious Party "Great Leap Backwards"?

JC
I agree and posted similarly.

"If the Nano succeeds Tata will change economies and societies. The call to deny people that opportunity is usually made by those who already benefit from it. How can I deny someone personal mobility, when I own a car."

http://rcd.typepad.com/personal/2008/01/tata-nano-it-do.htmlwhy does the somewhat affluent Jenetic Fitz on her farmlet milking a cow remind me of a fulfillment of the McGillicuddy Serious Party "Great Leap Backwards"?

Maybe because there are 2 ex-McGillicuddies currently sitting as MPs for the Greens, and several others are running around behind the scenes. That is why they get my vote - yay the great leap backwards!!
"Maybe because there are 2 ex-McGillicuddies currently sitting as MPs for the Greens, and several others are running around behind the scenes. That is why they get my vote - yay the great leap backwards!!"

You're joking? :)

JC
Of course the main problem is not the car, but that what they run on will still be operated as bureaucratically run and owned free to all infrastructure - government run roads.
This will be great for the poor, and it is completely unjust for us to deny them a car when we have them.

However there are environmental and practical concerns with increased global car numbers. Regardless of whether you believe in climate change or not, oil WILL be in shorter and shorter supply in the future. This is indisputable. We must look at alternatives to oil for very practical reasons.

We cannot deny the poor a car. But we can pursue solutions in our own country that will reduce oil consumption, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. This can only be good, in the long run, from a financial and national security point of view.

Let them have their cars. They are poor. We should have the cash to do better ourselves, rather than expect them to not use oil and leave it all for us to guzzle.
Nice post, Peter. Did you invent the word 'greenmonger'? If so, well said!

What these miserable specimens utterly fail to acknowledge is that development and industrial and material progress are, in themselves, the solutions to the so-called 'problems' that the greenies constantly put up against civilisation.

I grew up in post war London, where the pollution was so bad that the air at certain times was actually called 'pea soup'. Scores of people died each year from breathing in this crap. The trees and buildings were literally black tar-encrusted surfaces which nobody would want to touch.

If you go to London today it is almost inconceivable that this is the same city. It is a sparkling and stunning place now, and yet the standard of living and the level of consumer convenience far outstrips what was available in the 1950s. How was this achieved? By the application of technological knowhow and development, not by the withdrawal of it.

In India, likewise, the smoke and fumes from literally millions of 2-stroke motorised rickshaws makes the air in most of their cities almost unbreathable. The belching buses are almost as bad and the general effect is bedlam and stink. What fucking right do these eco-fucks have to try to deny the Indians progress? Their arrogance is beyond understanding.

London didn't clean up its act through fears for the PLANET.. it cleaned it up because the people needed to make their surroundings more habitable. Simple as that. No superstitious religion involved.

As for 'running out of oil', how many sane people actually believe that energy producers will just sit and watch their whole industries die in the unlikely event that the 'oil runs out'? Honestly. Humans will do whatever it takes to find a replacement for oil - provided our drive for progress isn't completely destroyed by the depressive propaganda of the eco-fucks in the meantime. We have the science. We have the technology... don't let these parasites deny us the will and the confidence to progress and develop.
Safety clothing essential
She has been suspended of course, in the same week as a man convicted of multiple violent offences murdered a man, while he was out on bail for another one.
Welcome to the land of milk and honey ... and the world's most unaffordable housing
The comments over at DPF-world on this very same topic are quite good.
Liars at large
An atheist in a foxhole
It’s typical that Christians “prey on the scared and venerable in times of stress” - what about the disreputable folks, don’t they deserve to be preyed upon as well?
With all due respect to you, Annie and foxholes - if that's the summation for believing in God, then you don't understand religion.

And on a sunny day at the beach, or a walk in the forest surrounded by nature, or looking up at the stars at night, or holding your baby when they have just been born - and you will also find believers.

Ironically therefore, Annie's thesis is built upon a false belief.It’s typical that Christians “prey on the scared and venerable in times of stress”

Annie has the wrong people in her sights.

Is she a friend of Al Gore by any chance?

Did she not enjoy reading Carson's Silent Spring?

Maybe she should be looking forward to a re-read of the Population Bomb (it's coming back in vogue).
Bollocks
A man comes running down the street shouting about a huge fire breathing dragon that he claims is following him. He calls on everyone to run for their lives. Yet, nothing appears. There is no dragon to be seen. The man is either having a joke or he is not sane.

Religious believers behave in a similar fashion. Trouble is, they are not joking. Religion is indeed a serious mental illness.

As was well said, religion is not a shortcut to knowledge, it is a mental short circuit.

LGM

PS as for believers in foxholes- such trembling hysterical belief is the result of years of inculcation of myths and stories. It is the pay-off of years of abuse of the young.
There is no comparison between men in foxholes and a diagnosis of cancer, with cancer at least you know the worst and it has been diagnosed properly and the professionals involved will have been trained to convey the awful information.

In foxholes with shells raining down men feel terror, not knowing whether the next one will mutilate them and leave them with appalling injuries. There is nothing they can do but hope, no second opinions, no sympathetic relatives, no support groups and no carefully thought out philosophical arguments. Just terror.
Anonymous

And you have the experience to know?

What utter gibberish and monkey talk.

Foolishness.

LGM
Zentiger - unlike you, my thesis is not built upon a "false belief", it's not built on any "belief" at all - that's the whole point.

I have walked in the forest with nature, looked at the stars at night, & held two of my nieces when they were seconds old. They were all beautiful and uplifting experiences - so what!

Why do believers link natures beauty as some kind of evidence of god's existence - it is just evidence of natures' beauty.

BTW: Strange that no one comments directly on my blog - feel free to attack the cancer girl - I won't break.
Annie, my point was you say people that believe in God believe so out of fear. That was your thesis. You went on to "prove it" with the beach example and your personal experiences.

I disagree. Any belief in God I have is not based on fear. I am living proof of a flaw in your thesis.

Also, I am not saying that people on a beach cannot be both atheists and believers. You are saying they are undoubtedly atheists.

Also, I am not saying people in foxholes are all believers. They can be both. I've known people who lived through the foxhole experience. Some were left believers, and others convinced there could not possibly be a God.

You ask: Why do believers link natures beauty as some kind of evidence of god's existence - it is just evidence of natures' beauty.

I'll suggest one possible reason: Because, to believers they cannot see the complexity and magic of life as the result of chaotic events that require such statistically improbable conditions to self-create.

You say "So what"? Well, up until now you were saying people believe in God do so out of fear. You use that as a basis for attacking people with such beliefs. Maybe now you'll believe they may have other reasons.

I'm not saying the reason proves one or the other. I'm just saying you need to factor in this element to your theory.

Re your "BTW" - Thanks for the invitation. I just responded to angloamerican's point. Didn't think to go to your blog (just due to other circumstances). I'll get there eventually.
LGM, I DO have the experience to know and I was never a religious person.Most guys start praying when the crap comes in, religious or not.A man comes running down the street shouting about a huge fire breathing dragon that he claims is following him. He calls on everyone to run for their lives. Yet, nothing appears. There is no dragon to be seen. The man is either having a joke or he is not sane.

Not really.

A caterpillar comes running down the street and says "if we eat the right foods, our chrysalis will be strong and we will die but be raised again as the most amazing of butterflys"

All the other caterpillars laugh and say "A dead caterpillar is a dead caterpillar. It matters not what you eat, or what you do."

Now the argument could more accurately be put "Are we caterpillars"?
Zen

You need to see a shrink. Fast.

LGM
LGM, both my father and his uncle a generation before endured and survived artillery barrages. It was against the odds. Passchaendaele, the 3rd Somme, and Monte Cassino were not measured informed crises for those involved. I asked my father what it was like to be under shellfire for the first time. His words were "undescribably terrifying, the sheer noise and percussion were enough to send you mad, you knew it was all over and you had nowhere else to go, you saw your mates smacked and shredded to chops. Just like Uncle --- had done in France, I shit myself"

This from a man I truly never saw afraid of anything or any man to the day he died, and then he looked his own death square in the eye and passed peacefully. He was not too proud to pray and thank God for preserving his life., nor to pass on the fact that God, not man, is supreme
The no atheists in fox holes Christian shit has been slammed many times.Indeed soldiers have been quoted as saying that the horror of war ended their previous belief in God because they could not reconcile how a "loving ,compassionate being" could allow such evil slaughter to happen....
Which is then countered by the doctrine of free will.

We are on this planet to live and die by the decisions we make. Every-thing we need to live in harmony has been provided to us. The rest is up to us.

If God was to intervene with every action leading to death, ultimately no-one would die. No-one would be aware of the consequences of doing evil, or allowing evil to happen.

But who is to say that he doesn't intervene in some way? That things could actually be worse than they are?

In any event - God or no God - don't excuse evil on our failure to stand up to it.

You want to live in heaven - earn it.

If it turns out there isn't such a thing, then maybe you'll find we get pretty close to heaven when every-one is unified and engaged in our attempts to earn a place there.

So what's the harm in striving to be a better, more compassionate person?

God or chance gave us our lives. What we do with it is still up to us.

Raging against this is just wasting time.

You only live a finite number of days. What are you choosing to experience today?
James posits "how can you beleive in such a god?"

When you see what man can do, how can you beleive in man?
The transitory beliefs and opinions of someone experiencing something “indescribably terrifying” are hardly worth worrying about. It would be more sensible to take notice of someone in a peaceful environment and in a relaxed mood. After all would you trust investment advice from a person suffering abject terror? So who cares what someone believes when the bombs are raining down?
I think the point is that when some-one is faced with their own mortality, they are forced to think a little harder in what they truly believe in.

But there are gentler ways for people to form new beliefs, or to work to change old habits.

A simple one that sometimes has a profound effect on people (queue mood music and soft lighting) is "What do you want people to say at your funeral?"
Annie, Have you read the Bible?Who told you that Atheism is the 'only rational position'?Do you equate God with the tooth fairy?...(That’s not rational!)Do you not believe in Good and evil or even your own soul?... (Or have you a conscience?)Do you think you are an evolved Germ?... (That’s not science but superstition!)How is that more rational than…“And God made man in his own image…”“By one man sin entered into the world and death…”“But God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”“For the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life”“For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved”???The Bible makes perfect sense and perfect justice.How is God supposed to save you Annie if you choose to reject him?Ought God to negate your freewill? (Materialism has no free will)Christ says to you “ behold I stand at the door and knock…”What stops you from openning the door?...Ask and ye shall recieve that your joy may be full!Tim Wikiriwhi
"So who cares what someone believes when the bombs are raining down?.."

The people in the target zone usually--

Which is the point of this whole thread. On the one hand Annie who faced the slow and quiet demise, championed by PC as proof that not all in foxholes are believers. On the other hand others opining that there is a difference between crisis and process. Folks faced with their own sudden mortality and who somehow survive it say it has a wonderfully clarifying and focusing effect.

I wish Annie well for a full recovery, long life and an openess in mind to accept that she is not some meaningless cypher that graced the earth for a spell, but someone loved by God.
Good on all you posters, especially zentiger, that have effectively shown the flaws in Annie's theory.

The fact is, either God is real or He is not.

Whether one person believes or not, or even the proportion of people who believe or don't, makes no difference to the fact. You can argue all you like about why people might believe - fear, logic, whatever sensible or ridiculous reasons you can come up with. The question still remains:

He exists, or He doesn't.

If He does exist, you have the possibility of gaining eternal life after you die, assuming you follow Him, a proposition that is not to be sneezed at.

If He doesn't exist, it really doesn't matter what you believe as you'll just die and rot anyway.

In other words, there is no purpose being an atheist. But if God exists, there is much to be gained by finding this out.

Therefore the most important thing you can possibly do in life is to investigate God, and try to find the answer to the age-old question:

Does God exist?

And if so, what should I do about it?

I would therefore encourage anyone who is unsure to spend time investigating this, rather than just criticising and ignoring it. You have all eternity to regret it if you don't.
The thing is Mr Dennis is that most Atheists are actually opposed to God and what he stands for and what he does and especially doesn’t do. Further investigation reveals that the God depicted in the Bible who comes across as a typical god of his times with great similarities to tyrannical and cruel kings and emperors who were often considered to be gods too. Remember that this god actually likes the smell of burning flesh. Many Atheists do set out to investigate God and come to the conclusion that he doesn’t exist and are disappointed that he cannot be opposed or reasoned with.
The official term for your theory Mr Dennis is Pascal's Wager.
James

That's a good point. How could a god allow such evil to occur (especially when so much of it is done in his name)?

For evil to exist then God must be the root source of evil. By a acts of commission and/or of omission he causes and allows evil to occur.

LGM
"That's a good point. How could a god allow such evil to occur (especially when so much of it is done in his name)?"If there's such a thing as God, then why assume He wouldn't allow such a thing as evil to exist? Perhaps evil has a purpose, who knows?The assumption that life ought to be free of all evil and suffering seems to me to be arrogant and narrow-minded. And to take a position that there is no God because evil exists is childish.In any case, leaving aside the tiny minority of extremist Christians who are in no way representative of the faith as a whole, my own observation is that those families and individuals with strong Christian values appear to be happier and more ethical than those without.A generalisation, yes but one that I find striking and obvious. Every time I make that observation I'm assailed by non-believers as a religious nut, but I'm an agnostic and have no dog in this fight.
I'll counter your observation with my observation and that is the most trustworthy and generous people I have come across have generally been non believers. If I was sharing a foxhole with someone I'd rather it be an Atheist with his finger on the trigger - more useful than someone crouched in prayer. I'd wager that the Atheist is more likely to haul my wounded body out of there while under fire too.
KG

The point is, assumimg a god to exist, then he would not only be evil, he would necessarily be the source of ALL evil.

Why worship evil? That WOULD be evil.

LGM
"I'd wager that the Atheist is more likely to haul my wounded body out of there while under fire too."Unless you're going on purely statistical data (ie more atheists than religious people in the military) you have no basis for that assertion. Some of the bravest men under fire have been those who are C.O's due to their religious beliefs (often medics)and military chaplains.lgm, I don't see any reason to believe that a God would have to be either the source of all evil or evil himself. You're going purely on faith for that claim. ;-) Perhaps the Christian claim of an "all-powerful" God assumes that we mere mortals would understand that evil exists independently of God and God expects us to battle evil?I dunno, I'm no theologian. But the amount of energy militant atheists put into their attacks on religion seems a little odd.I'd save that energy for the ideology that specialises in raping schoolchildren and lopping the heads from the unbeliever's shoulders.
KG

According to believers God created the universe... Therefore unless he created everything except for that which is evil, he must be the source of all evil. Should he not have created evil, then he did not create the universe.

LGM
Sigh...we could go round in circles all day with this and I've already said I'm neither a Christian nor a theologian.But neither am I convinced there's no such thing as God--I simply don't know. Anybody who claims to know with absolute certainty that there is no God is guilty of exactly what they accuse believers of--a blind leap of faith.
KG

By that reasoning you can't deny that there are fairies and pixies living at the bottom of my garden. After all, to say there were not any there would require a "leap of faith."

LGM
I'm suprised you're so wishy washy KG but then you do claim to be an agnostic...snigger. Agnostic about Santa Claus too I suppose?
You two are now coming across as a pair of pimply juvenile smartasses. If that's the level of discussion you're after, go find someone happy to play with oafs.
"Is God the source of all evil"?

We had been talking about the doctrine of free will, but seem to have veered off it but come at it again from another angle.

First we must understand evil before we can agree or disagree that God is the "source of evil", given he is creator of the universe.

There is a tendency to see evil as a being. This is patently wrong. If evil were a being then God created it and your proposition might hold. But evil does not exist as a "being". It doesn't even exist as a created thing.

Swords may kill, but in themselves, they are not evil.

Water can kill, but is necessary also to sustain life.

Things, in themselves are not evil.

God created every thing, and none of those things are intrinsically evil.

So what is evil? I suggest there are two types of evil. Physical evil and moral evil.

Looking at the example of a sword - if it chops off your head LGM, would that be evil? Some on this blog might argue it isn't. Where is the evil? It is in the intent of the person doing the chopping. The intent, the will or the choice.

Evil is real, but it is not a real thing. It is a discordance between our will and God's will. God did not make it. We chose it.

We need to understand the difference between moral and physical evil. The first can be thought of as sin, the evil we actively do. The second can be thought of as suffering, the evil that is done to us.

There are two major strands of thinking that explain these two types of evil.

The origin of the first is Free Will. The root of the second is nature. The decision to strike with a sword or the tragedy of being drowned in a flood.

The first, sin is fairly easy to see that it is not caused by God, but chosen by us. He gave us free will, and it would not be so if we were not free to chose even evil.

The second, suffering as a form of evil is the meatier subject I think.

But is it worth pursuing this conversation further?

It seems to me the intent behind the comments is not one of genuine debate, but of opportunity to ridicule. Are people so sure they have all the answers? I don't claim to have, but I do think I've learned a lot more than I expected when I (just recently actually) started looking into this whole "God" thing.
We must have hit a nerve, LGM J Listen KG your comments are worthless if you “don’t have a dog in this race” yet you say we shouldn’t comment – sheesh. You’re the one who should find someone else to play with.

Anyway, it seems to me that most theists when they ponder upon the nature of God are trying to think too deeply. What they are really pondering is not a real intervening, creating type of god but an abstract, metaphorical thing, a bit like “God is love” sort of thing or God as representative of all that is good sort of concept. When God occupies this sort of position he is no longer physical but simply a term or symbol of high human aspirations. And this is exactly what he is. In that sense it is nonsense to accuse him of creating evil. But if he were a real intervening entity, a being that could be questioned as one would question an accused in a court of law, then he could surely be accused of standing by and watching innocents suffer and doing nothing even though he clearly could stop it easily. All those abducted, murdered children could have been saved effortlessly yet they were not. We would not accept this behaviour from a human and a human would surely be convicted and jailed. So God’s only excuse, only defence is….tada…that he doesn’t actually exist.We must have hit a nerve, LGM J Listen KG your comments are worthless if you “don’t have a dog in this race” yet you say we shouldn’t comment – sheesh.

I think KG was saying that you and LGM are being unecessarily rude. Do you not see the difference?

You guys seem to never respond directly to the counter point offered.

Let's go back a few steps.

LGM came up with a dragon story analogy. I countered with a far better analogy.

The response was "Go see a shrink".

Anyone care to defend the dragon story analogy now that I have countered it? Anyone care to tell me exactly why my analogy doesn't work for them?
Are you referring to the caterpillar analogy? Please don't make me think about that!

Also KG is confused or disingenuous or both - that is a Christian cross symbol on his gravatar is it not?Are you referring to the caterpillar analogy? Please don't make me think about that!

Well, as far as meaningful responses go, that's up there with "see a shrink". It might be worth an attempt to think. Care to tell me why you don't want to think? (about that)
Zentiger

There were several reasons I recommended you see a shrink.

Firstly, like a man who claims to see fire breathing dragons when there are none, you are treating make-believe, dreams and myths as though they are true. Worse, you are attempting to hide the nature of that misguided evil muck and demand other people take it seriously. In practice you ARE the man claiming to see fire breathing dragons and urging others to take the delusions seriously.

Take a look at the contempible nonsense you introduced into the discussion, caterpillars that run down the street, caterpillars that speak, caterpillars that are raised from the dead (a favourite line of bullshit of religious nutters) and so on. Utter lunacy.

Try very hard to understand. Caterpillars do not run down the street. They do not speak. Nor do they die when they form a chyrsalis.

In case you hadn't realised, a caterpillar is alive and well inside its chyrsalis, not dead. Were it not alive, then the biological processes that alter its attributes such that it changes into a moth or butterfly would cease. It would fail to emerge. Further, it is not "raised" from the dead when it emerges from its chyrsalis. It emerges exactly according to the natural processes that occurred within its cocoon and according to its own attributes. It was alive the entire time. That's what caterpillars do. They are what they are.

The evidence to prove all this exists in reality. On the other hand, there are no talking caterpillars that run down the street, that die when they form a cocoon and that are "raised" (presumably from the dead) when they emerge again.

Second point, and indeed an important point to well note, is how you evaded putting your obnoxious and obscene case directly. You avoided stating that some supernatural entity (a spirit monster god ghost thing) "raised" the caterpillar from the dead. The implication was present, even though you weren't game enough to come out and state it up front.

I guess even you realised, at some level, the insanity of the position you were promoting. At some level you were ashamed to openly state the fundamental idiocy that is your premise. Fool! Moron! Imbecile!

Thirdly, I was expressing contempt for the pathetic argument you were attempting to peddle. It really isn't worth the time taken to rebut. So, I simply suggested you get timely assistance, just as I have suggested the same to people (two so far) who I've come across claiming fire breathing dragons and such like are chasing them.

Forth, you really have no argument. Your so-called analogy is hardly that. It is a red herring, an off-topic story. Even if one assumes for a moment that caterpillars do "rise again" from the dead and that they do speak to each other when they run down the street, then that still does absolutely bluudddy NOTHING to defend your position that a supernatural God exists. You have provided absolutely nothing of value or intelligence. Not a thing. Not a skerrick. And that leads to the final point for the moment...

I sugested you see a shrink as the position you are taking is mentally incompetant. You need to get help before your mind collapses irretrievably into superstition, self-delusion and bullshit.

LGM
Anyone considered the nature of the faith of the religious god-fearing men who crew the artillery pieces and fire the shells at the fox holes?

"Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition..."

Now that's what the faith is really about!

LGMThis comment has been removed by the author.
Zen said...We have people relating 'near death experiences' and 'out of body experiences' and 'died and resuscitated' experiences that hint of a mystery beyond the mortal coil to consider.

Zen, here is a good reading on NDE (near death experience). From what I have read and seen documentaries about its (NDE) rebuttal is there is nothing extra-ordinary about it. It is just a physiological process that causes it and not friends from the other side, who are showing these NDE people the door to them (other side).

Abstract: Several theories to account for the origin of tunnel hallucinations and tunnel experiences near death are considered: (1) the idea of a ldquorealrdquo tunnel; (2) representations of transition; (3) reliving birth memories; (4) imagination; and (5) physiological origins. Three different physiological theories are considered that related the tunnel form to the structure of the visual cortex. All can account for much of the phenomenology of the tunnel experience, and all lead to testable predictions. It is argued that the tunnel experience involves a change in the mental model of the self in the world. Because of this, an experience of purely physiological origin, with no implications for other worlds or for survival, can nevertheless produce lasting changes in the sense of self and reduce the fear of death.
On re-reading my previous comment, it may be hard to follow my points. I hope this one is better! I'll try again here: (LGM's text is in italics)

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to comment LGM.

..In practice you ARE the man claiming to see fire breathing dragons and urging others to take the delusions seriously.

Because you think you know what happens after death, you claim I am deluded. From our perspective, it is likely death is absolute, but not certain.

..Try very hard to understand. Caterpillars do not run down the street. They do not speak. Nor do they die when they form a chyrsalis.

You must surely realise I was joking when I mentioned the caterpillar running down the street. Because your analogy went: A man comes running down the street shouting about a huge fire breathing dragon…, I simply started my analogy with “A caterpillar comes running down the street and says…” as a humorous device to lead in with my analogy. But I suspect you realise this.

In case you hadn't realised, a caterpillar is alive and well inside its chyrsalis, not dead. Were it not alive, then the biological processes that alter its attributes such that it changes into a moth or butterfly would cease. It would fail to emerge. Further, it is not "raised" from the dead when it emerges from its chyrsalis...

The thing about analogies is that they are stories or ideas to parallel another concept. The “caterpillar” analogy, which is fairly well known goes more simply like this: What a caterpillar calls the end of life, the master calls a butterfly.

The concept is that, like a caterpillar arguably does not know and understand the transformation it is about to undergo, so may it possibly be for us.

If I used an analogy to liken a pump to a heart, you can't declare me insane when you discover a pump is an inorganic, mechanical object instead of a thing of muscle tissue and blood. In this instance, it is the function of the pump we consider, not its construction materials.

This analogy, and my point, doesn’t rely on the point the caterpillar doesn’t actually die. I am not asking you to believe in being raised from the dead in this life. Just the possibility that we cannot definitely know if death of our physical body in this world means some aspect of our being moves to another world.

The evidence to prove all this exists in reality. On the other hand, there are no talking caterpillars that run down the street, that die when they form a cocoon and that are "raised" (presumably from the dead) when they emerge again.

You are deliberately misreading my point. You must realise that I was not suggesting I believe caterpillars talk.

I agree the difficulty is always going to be looking for a way to prove the existence of something outside of our objective reality. But that is a later conversation I think.

It may be we have a very limited understanding of death. Just as we know about this universe, but we don’t know about any others. It hasn't stopped people advancing theories on why there may be other universes. Are they crazy?

Second point, and indeed an important point to well note, is how you evaded putting your obnoxious and obscene case directly. You avoided stating that some supernatural entity (a spirit monster god ghost thing) "raised" the caterpillar from the dead. The implication was present, even though you weren't game enough to come out and state it up front.

I guess even you realised, at some level, the insanity of the position you were promoting. At some level you were ashamed to openly state the fundamental idiocy that is your premise. Fool! Moron! Imbecile!

No, my point does not require that God raises a dead person back to life in this world. Just as God isn’t required to take direct intervention for each caterpillar transformation. The essence of the spirit moving to other existence may be built into a greater “natural order” that we are currently ignorant about. You have made an erroneous assumption here.

Thirdly, I was expressing contempt for the pathetic argument you were attempting to peddle.

Yes, I can see that.

It really isn't worth the time taken to rebut. So, I simply suggested you get timely assistance, just as I have suggested the same to people (two so far) who I've come across claiming fire breathing dragons and such like are chasing them.

No, your dragon analogy is barely worth taking the time to rebut. It is flawed, more so than the caterpillar analogy (and please take out the talking bits if they confuse you).

Forth, you really have no argument. Your so-called analogy is hardly that. It is a red herring, an off-topic story. Even if one assumes for a moment that caterpillars do "rise again" from the dead and that they do speak to each other when they run down the street, then that still does absolutely bluudddy NOTHING to defend your position that a supernatural God exists. You have provided absolutely nothing of value or intelligence...

My analogy was on-topic because it spoke to your dragon story comment.

You harping on about the obvious humor I injected about a talking caterpillar makes you look a little desperate (as far as I can see). My point was not to prove that God exists, it was to debate your own analogy, that some-how is supposed to prove God doesn't exist. I wasn't convinced.

Maybe if you have the dragon talk :-)
Yikes, I should have refreshed before cleaning up my old comment and posting a (hopefully) more understandable one.

Ironically, one of the points I decided was unimportant was the one you quoted back to me, Falafulu Fisi.

Thanks for the link anyway. Did it also cover out of body experiences too? I haven't read much about these, but a couple of accounts make interesting reading.

I find the discussion around miracles is more fascinating though. If miraculous events happen (and as rare as genuine miracles are, I think they do happen) it leads to yet more gaps in our understanding of life, death and the universe.
Here is a cut & paste from the following article : Near-Death Experience - NDE.

However, researchers have been unsuccessful in running proactive experiments to establish out-of-body consciousness. There have been numerous experiments in which a random message was placed in a hospital in a manner that it would be invisible to patients or staff yet visible to a floating being, but so far, according to Blackmore (1991), these experiments have only provided equivocal results and no clear signs of ESP.

I recalled an episode of CBS 60 Minutes from the late 1990s (I think it was 1998), where the show host was interviewing a researcher who was part of the team that conducted this experiment (it must have been Dr. Blackmore or her colleague) where neon lights were used in emergency room (critical care unit) for the test. These neon signs had specific written texts which was placed above on top of a wall-mounted cupboard in the room. The height at where the neon lights were placed (top of the wall-mounted cupboard ) was well above the tallest person in the room. That means that an emergency physician or a nurse had to use a stool or a chair to stand on in order to peek and find out what the written texts on the neon lights were. They found out that almost all the patients that they interviewed who went thru emergency surgical operations in that unit described out-of-body experience and NDE. They described that they were floating above and had been watching the doctors and nurses operating on them. The amazing thing was, when they were asked by the researching team if any of them also saw the neon texts above on top of the wall-mounted cupboard. And if they did, then what the written texts were and no single person to have reported seeing any text. This clearly shows that they were not floating at all. They were just experiencing a pure physiological process or mechanism in the brain perhaps due to lack of oxygen as frequently reported.
ZenTiger, it’s interesting that kg identifies himself with an image of a Christian holy warrior yet he is agnostic and your identification has elements of the occult and Buddhism along with Animism ….it looks like you believe in most things!

Thanks, LGM, for the detailed analysis of the caterpillar pseudo analogy, now I need not perform this onerous task.